Archive of the American Songbook Finds a New Home in the Heartland

The Center for the Performing Arts in Carmel, Ind., will house the collection of the musician and archivist Michael Feinstein.Credit
Chester Higgins, Jr./The New York Times

Michael Feinstein is perhaps best known as a singer and pianist and the owner of a cabaret on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that bears his name. He’s also well known as a passionate historian of American song and for his vast collection of memorabilia. Now his collection will be housed at a new performing arts center in Carmel, Ind., a three-hour drive from his childhood home.

Mr. Feinstein, 54, said he accepted an invitation to house the collection at the $150 million Center for Performing Arts in Carmel because the cost of doing so in New York or another large city would have been prohibitive. A native of Columbus, Ohio, he also regarded Carmel, a suburb of Indianapolis, as a quintessential heartland location to display his collection of American music from the 1920s to the 1960s.

“The Great American Songbook is about the diversity of our country,” he said this week in a telephone interview. “Many writers came from New York or created music in Hollywood, but they came from everywhere, including Hoagy Carmichael and Cole Porter from Indiana.”

Photo

The new 1,600-seat Palladium Theater in Carmel, Ind., is part of the Center for the Performing Arts.Credit
Brian Spurlock

“We estimate that Michael’s collection could fill a 70,000-square-foot building between display and storage,” said the center’s president and executive director, Steven Libman. “Michael wanted a place where the collection wouldn’t be lost among other collections or the glitter of a larger city.”

Mr. Feinstein, who was Ira Gershwin’s assistant for six years, has amassed a collection that includes hundreds of thousands of pages of original sheet music and full orchestrations from composers like Rudy Vallee, Henry Mancini and Peter Allen. He has thousands of LPs, private recordings and demos, and memorabilia like a snow globe that Irving Berlin gave to Rosemary Clooney after the filming of “White Christmas”; a 10-page telegram from Florenz Ziegfeld to Gus Kahn; a drawing of sheet-music art from the original “Porgy and Bess”; a limited-edition score of “Red, Hot and Blue” autographed in 1937 by Cole Porter and given to Mr. Feinstein by Bob Hope; and George Gershwin’s first song contract from 1916.

Much of the collection was kept in Mr. Feinstein’s homes in New York, Los Angeles and Carmel, in addition to three storage units in California — all of it meticulously catalogued. “You give me any space, and I can fill it up,” he said.

“Before I started a foundation people were giving me things because they didn’t know what to do with them or their families didn’t want them,” he added. “When people donate something they want to know that it will continue to have a life. Many places accept things which then go into a black hole.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 5, 2011, on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: Archive of the American Songbook Finds a New Home in the Heartland. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe